POV: Mara
Ash falls like dirty snow. It clings to hair, lashes, skin—oily, wrong, tasting like metal scraped off a blade. The south span is a mouth full of broken teeth, stone jutting at angles that make the whole bridge look like it’s snarling.
“Back!” a Shield shouts, grabbing my arm. “Regent’s order—”
“No!” I snap, wrenching free so violently he stumbles. My voice cracks like something inside me split. “I know how to dig and I know his breath!”
He stares as if I just named a god. People freeze for less. But then he steps back, gives me space—not approval, just stunned surrender. That’s enough.
Silvie appears through the ash like a ghost with purpose, thrusting a strip of wet cloth into my hands. “For your face. Please. Don’t you dare inhale this filth.”
I tie it over my nose and mouth. It’s warm from her hands. It smells faintly of mint and soap—the only soft things left in this moment.
Then I run into the gray.
The rubble field is a nightmare drawn by someone who hates straight lines. Stones lean like drunks. Beams lie cracked open, guts of splintered wood spilling into puddles of muddy water. Smoke curls low, thick as wool, making the air taste like old fire.
Screams are swallowed by dust until they don’t sound like screams anymore—just animal sounds trying to be human. I move anyway. My breath is sharp, each inhale a fight.
Aster hums low, a thread pulled tight through every bone I own. A compass with no kindness.
“Left.”
I go left, stumbling over broken rope. My knees hit stone. Pain sparks in my shins. I don’t stop.
“Down.”
I drop to the ground and shove my hands through sludge and grit until my nails bend backwards. The cloth over my face is already soaked, already gritty. My eyes sting. The taste of ash crawls down my throat.
My fingers find a gap between two blocks—narrow, mean. I shove my arm into the dark until the stone scrapes skin.
Nothing. Just cold rock, slick mud.
Panic claws up my throat like an animal trying to escape. I want to scream. I want to rip the bridge apart with my hands. I close my eyes and breathe like I told that child earlier—slow, tide-like, steady even when the world isn’t.
Aster again, not louder—truer, threaded with something ancient. “Farther.”
I push farther, shoulder grinding against stone, breath wheezing through the cloth. Then—warm. Not stone. Not rope. Skin.
My palm finds a chest, shallow rise, shallow fall. My heart slams against my ribs so hard the cloth sucks into my mouth when I gasp.
“Here!” I scream, voice shattering. “Here—hands!”
Boots skid. Ash sprays. Jax drops beside me like the world owes him speed. He swears the kind of word that rattles a lifespan. “Found him?!”
“I think—” My voice is sandpaper. “He’s pinned.”
Lorre and another Shield wedge a pry bar into the crack. Stone shifts with a groan like a dying animal. Dust pours out, choking everything in reach. The gap opens enough to see an arm—Cael’s arm—slide free with a sound I never want to hear again.
I bite my lip so hard it bleeds, because if I throw up now, I lose seconds he doesn’t have.
“Hold him,” Jax commands. “On three—one—two—now.”
We haul. His body comes out half and then sticks at the waist. His trapped leg is bent wrong, wrong, wrong in a way the world should apologize for.
Rhun hits me like a blow in my skull—rage, fear, a wolf shredding its cage. “Mine.”
“I know,” I whisper, crying and choking and shaking and not caring who hears.
Cael’s eyes slit open, barely. Ash paints his lashes white. He looks like a statue that someone refused to let die. He finds me like he always does, even half-buried and broken.
“Mara,” he says, barely air, just a shape of my name shaped by pain.
“I’m here,” I breathe. “I’m here.”
He tries to smile; it comes out like a cut on his mouth. “Bossy,” he murmurs, and the sound is so weak it breaks something soft inside me.
Then he goes under again.
“Get him clear!” Jax barks, the kind of order that does not allow grief or fear to answer back.
We slide him onto a makeshift board—plank, belts, a blanket turned stretcher. He moans once, a sound that vibrates through my ribs. I grip the board so tight my knuckles ache.
The world around us keeps collapsing—people yelling, rocks shifting, the hiss of rope breaking under weight—but all I know is this small circle around him: skin, breath, ash, the stubborn rise of his chest.
The Regent’s voice slices through chaos—nightmare-calm, terrifyingly controlled: “Withdrawal to second line! Now! Shields, smoke! Pull back in sequence!”
“Enemy banners advancing,” Lorre snaps, glancing over her shoulder. “We have to move.”
Move. Move him. Move us. Move the world.
“Move him,” I say, already lifting my corner before anyone else moves. My arms shake. I don’t care. “Go.”
“Careful,” Jax warns, grabbing the front.
“I’m past careful,” I say. “I’m greedy.”
We carry him through ash rain toward the inner gate. My legs burn. My chest stings. Someone stumbles into me; I snarl without turning. People reach to touch him as we pass—as if touching his skin will bless them or prove he’s alive. I bare my teeth and keep walking.
We push through the collapsing courtyard, where smoke curls like dying hands and wounded people gather in clusters, praying or bleeding or both. A child screams for his mother. A man with a broken arm tries to help another who can’t stand. The city looks like it’s kneeling.
A healer kneels in front of us, eyes wide, hair wild from running. “We need clean,” she says, voice trembling. “We need light. We need time.”
“We have none of those,” I answer, setting Cael down as gently as shaking arms allow.
And she knows it.
We all do.